


i've always known you weren't perfect, i knew you had your secrets

by Duck_Life



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Charles Xavier Is A Bastard, F/M, Snippets, X-Men: Deadly Genesis - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 13:28:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17325884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: Scott's been under the thumb of one manipulative telepath or another since he was 10 years old.





	i've always known you weren't perfect, i knew you had your secrets

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this ages ago, after I read 'Deadly Genesis' for the first time, but figured it was too short to bother posting. Decided I'd toss it up here now that Scotty's back from the dead.

Scott sits in the cockpit of the Blackbird, trying to calm his racing nerves. Jean is counting on him, Alex is counting on him

_ (Gabriel) _

There's a whole new team looking to him for experience and guidance and he can't be scared right now, can't be neurotic, needs to be Cyclops. 

He reaches down to flip a switch and something like déjà vu washes over him. He shivers. 

  
  


* * *

 

“Scott—”

“Emma, please, I can't, not now,” he garbles out, one hand braced against an exterior wall of the school and the sun is hitting his glasses at the exact wrong angle and he is  _ spiraling _ . He's just sent a man away from his own family mansion, told him he wasn't welcome at the school he founded, and that's pitted against the fact that that man is maybe the closest thing he's ever had to a father, and that man is his mentor, and that man is a cold-blooded monster. “I just… I need to be alone, okay?”

Behind him, he hears Emma pause, no longer approaching him. “Alright,” she says. “But come find me when you need to not be alone.”

 

* * *

 

“You are not my father,” he snarls, and lets loose. 

 

* * *

  
  


“Sometimes I wish I'd gotten all of you out of there, when you were children,” Erik says. “Maybe then you wouldn't have been indoctrinated into the myth of Charles Xavier.”

“Right,” Scott scoffs. “You were trying to kill us when we were children. These rivets over there.”

Erik fixes up the walkway the way Scott says to. “I wouldn't have killed you,” he points out. “I wasn't truly the bloodthirsty tyrant you seem to remember.” 

Scott huffs, disbelieving. But all he says is, “Can you move that pile of scrap metal?”

“Of course.” He does. “What you need to understand is… if you make an enemy of Charles Xavier, he will turn the world against you. I mean, look at you. Charles is dead, and still your friends and family hate you on his behalf.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


“They're all the same.”

“Darling,” Emma says softly, her hand on his arm. His eyes are squinched shut. 

“Jack, Milbury, Xavier,” he lists, not leaning into her touch but not moving away. “They're all the fucking same.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Scott encounters telepath after telepath and they all do the same, all tear into his mind like they're ripping into a Christmas present, and they play and play and play, lining him up like a plastic toy soldier and making him fight, or else making up stories about him, changing details when they get bored or change their minds.

Jean first, and then Emma. They are the only ones to go into his mind and leave it unchanged. The only ones who don't edit him, try to turn him into something else, something kinder or stronger or more palatable. Jean takes him as is, and so does Emma, and he dies without ever telling either of them how much that meant.

They both probably knew, though.

 


End file.
